Ghost Ensemble + Laura Cetilia at Wind River

Ghost Ensemble performs Catherine Lamb

Sat., May 20, 2023
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm
Wind River
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$26 General | $19.50 Members | $15 Students/Underemployed

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Ghost Ensemble joins us in Santa Cruz for a two-night residency of new work, with opening performances by their close friends, colleagues, and ensemble members. On the two-night culmination of their West Coast tour, the ensemble performs new work by Catherine Lamb, Ben Richter, and Sky Macklay.

Ghost Ensemble

Name: Ghost Ensemble + Laura Cetilia at Wind River
Start: 2023-05-20 20:30:00 -0700
End: 2023-05-20 22:30:00 -0700
Location: Wind River

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding our perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has commissioned 34 new works by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often straddles contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, sound art, and territories in between.

Program

Catherine Lamb’s interius/exterius, composed in close collaboration with the musicians of Ghost Ensemble through the 2021-22 season, investigates how collective intentions or focal points allow various and sometimes unusual pathways to emerge. As the group links together in phase, the greater web of activity aligns intention and desire within a community of musicians sounding together, the initiation of sound constantly shifting, unfolding new sonic dimensions.

This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Catherine Lamb is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal, and the long introduction form. “Simultaneously singular and, somehow, all-encompassing in her approach,” Lamb creates a musical experience that is “infinitely inspiring and reflective of the human condition” (Nate Wooley, Sound American).

Laura Cetilia’s nestled in the static is a unique immersive listening experience comprised of pre-recorded spatialized sound and live acoustic cello and voice. Created by Chicanx composer/performer Laura Cetilia, the work explores ideas around noise and euphony, their individual beauty and im/balance with one another. The pre-recorded material is diffused throughout the venue with an array of twelve mini-speakers while the composer herself is ensconced in the center of the sound field.

Audience members are encouraged to move around the space to discover what each vantage point has to offer: undulations of noise, gently beating tones, metallic tinkling, and/or soaring cello lines.

Cellist and electronic musician Laura Cetilia is a performer, composer, educator, and presenter. As a daughter of mixed heritage (second generation Mexican-American), she is at home with in-betweeness, moving through genres and practices as she did with cultures and languages growing up on the Eastside of Los Angeles. As a composer, her music has been described as “unorthodox loveliness” by the Boston Globe and “alternately penetrating and atmospheric” in Sequenza 21.

Laura Cetilia: nestled in the static

As a daughter of mixed heritage, Mexican-American cellist, Laura Cetilia is at home with in-betweenness, straddling the worlds of performer / composer, acoustic / electronic and traditional / experimental sound practices. Her music has been described as “unorthodox loveliness” (Boston Globe) and hailed as “alternately penetrating and atmospheric” (Sequenza 21). Her compositions have been played by ensembles such as Wet Ink, HereNowHear, tacet(i), Mivos Quartet, S.E.M. Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, Dog Star Orchestra, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Verdant Vibes, LCollective, The Furies, and violinist Erik Carlson. She has created site-specific sound installations for the Bennington Museum and Ben Ari Museum for Contemporary Art. She has curated for the performance series ctrl+alt+repeat (est. 2004) , ars subtilior, public offering, durational concerts at RISD museum, and for the Estuary Ltd. imprint. The Grove Dictionary of American Music describes her electroacoustic duo Mem1 as a “complex cybernetic entity” that “understands its music as a feedback loop between the past and present.” In the performer / composer collective Ordinary Affects she has collaborated with, commissioned and premiered works by composers such as Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Jürg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, and Magnus Granberg. She is currently pursuing her D.M.A. in Music Composition at Cornell University and is a proud mother of one.

Lou Harrison: Air in G Minor

Catherine Lamb: interius/exterius

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Wa, U.S.), is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand the structures and intonations within Hindustani Classical Music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006 who was directly connected to Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and whose philosophical approach to sound became important to her. She studied (experimental) composition at the California Institute of the Arts (2004-2006) under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was there also that she began her work into the area of Just Intonation, which became a clear way to investigate the interaction of tones and ever-fluctuating shades, where these interactions in and of them-selves became structural elements in her work. Since then she has written various ensemble pieces (at times with liminal electronic portions) and continues to go further into elemental territories, through various kinds of research, collaboration, and practice (herself as a violist). She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2012 and is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.

Since its founding in 2012, Ghost Ensemble has dedicated itself to long-term study of experimental music with a focus on new perceptual perspectives that explore the experience of listening. The group has extensively explored the Deep Listening philosophy of Pauline Oliveros, collaborating with the composer to inaugurate the release of her Anthology of Text Scores at Eyebeam in 2013, and has previously premiered new works written for the ensemble by John Rot, Leonie Roessler, Kyle Gann, Lucie Vítkova, Sky Macklay, and Somna M Bulist. Ghost Ensemble’s performance techniques realize fragile, liminal sounds, produced by virtuosic performers who are experts on their instruments. These practices can only be realized through long-term collaborations between composers and performers. Tax-deductible donations to Ghost Ensemble’s commissioning project support a crucial stage of this long-term relationship between composers and performers, and help to shape its future.